Читать книгу Colour Me Yellow - Thuli Nhlapo - Страница 4

words not sticks can eitherbuild or destroy our future

What’s it like to be a normal child?

I must have been seven years old when I realised that no one called me by my name. While some cousins called me by my nickname Tho, my Paternal Grandmother, the mother of the Father I grew up thinking and hoping was my father, called me Mabovana – referring to my light-skinned complexion. There was nothing wrong with that. Mother and I were the only light-skinned members of the family. Others were either a little bit darker or even pitch black. Even though I didn’t mind, because I didn’t understand, I noticed that three of my aunts and the older cousins referred to me as boesman.

I was already doing grade one – sub-standard A in those days – at Tlo-Tlo Mpho Primary School in Ga-Rankuwa near Pretoria. Apparently, the school was called Siyokhela before the area was incorporated into a Bantustan.

I was convinced something was terribly wrong with me. My teacher never called anyone nasty names, not even those pupils who wet their pants and gym dresses. Some even soiled themselves, but Ma’am Ncanywa would be very understanding of their little accidents. She was a short, well-nourished Xhosa woman who would send those unfortunate pupils to the bathroom to wash their gym dresses or pants and hang them in the sun, telling them to sit outside while waiting for their school uniforms to dry. But if I dared not wipe my slate properly she would refer to me as ‘this yellow thing’ or say ‘you’re as yellow as a pumpkin’.

I learned to get everything right the first time to avoid being called yellow. As a result of trying never to be wrong I became very quiet and I never spoke unless I was spoken to. When answering, I would speak as softly as possible to make sure that no one noticed me. I even took up as little space as I could, trying to make myself invisible.

I might not have known what being ‘yellow’ meant but the way it was said told me it was something bad, something to be ashamed of. I learned very quickly that in order to survive as a yellow thing (and also as a boesman) I must not only do well but I must excel at everything. That, I reasoned, would take attention away from my yellowness and help me stay unnoticed because I was excruciatingly shy.

To put a smile on my teacher’s face and to prove that the yellow thing wasn’t as bad as she thought, I remember collecting loads of the papers wrapped around Nestlé condensed-milk tins at that time, determined to win a competition draw at our school. Other learners tried hard but I was the best, with the highest number of wrappers. I won the Nestlé competition and the prize was a white T-shirt with the word Nestlé written in bold red across the front. Deep down it felt good to excel. I was awarded the prize in front of all the pupils, even those from the senior grades. They all clapped their hands.

That taught me one lesson: there’s only one way for you, little yellow girl, silence your critics by always winning.

Four of my cousins attended the same primary school with me in Ga-Rankuwa. At the time the area belonged to the independent state of Bophuthatswana, hence the mother tongue at school was seTswana. I travelled on the same school bus as my cousins because we lived far from the school in an unknown little place called Tsebe near Klipgat. Our houses were all situated in the same yard, but as soon as home was out of sight we became strangers. I walked behind, remembering not to share a seat in the bus with any of them.

The boesman issue was getting worse, even though I still didn’t know the meaning of the word. On the days when some of my cousins didn’t have tuck-shop money, they preferred to share other kids’ food rather than eat with me. I concluded that the boesman thing must be contagious. Instead of trying to get closer to my friend Mambu Ellinah Moeti, I made sure to distance myself because I didn’t want to make her sick. In fact, she was also doubtful of being around me, always checking me out and uttering unflattering statements such as: ‘Why do you tie your belt in such a stupid way?’ or ‘Your hair isn’t properly combed’ or ‘The pleats in your gym dress look ugly, like they weren’t pressed with a hot iron.’

I assumed that I was not only different as a boesman but I was also sick. When nurses came to the school to immunise us the puncture marks on my arm became swollen. In those days inoculation was not administered as a single injection that left no mark like nowadays. We were inoculated with a stamp-like gadget that had to be pushed into your shoulder. It must have made six punctures for that’s what it left on soft sensitive skin. Since my first inoculation became swollen, the nurses were prompted to repeat that stamp-like immunisation more than once. I was sure it was being yellow that made me sick because my cousins’ immunisations didn’t swell. On top of all that, I was given little white tablets by my class teacher. The nurses didn’t say why I had to take them and the teacher didn’t bother to explain. Every time I swallowed them, I felt embarrassed to be a sick yellow boesman thing. Four rings of brown skin with tiny pores are still visible on my right arm to this day as proof that I wasn’t as healthy as the other children, and I assumed it was all because I was yellow and a boesman. The problem was that I didn’t know what it meant to be yellow or a boesman – I only knew it was bad.

Although I got the answers right in class, I wasn’t good at any school sport and I couldn’t sing and dance like most of my female classmates. I enjoyed the moments spent in the dark watching Bruce Lee movies at a hall in Zone 16 on occasional school trips. To my mind, the way he kicked everyone around placed him among the gods to be worshipped. Maybe that’s the reason I chose karate as a sport later in life – to kick butt for real. Other precious moments in school were the days magicians came to perform for us. We paid five cents to watch. The way those guys managed to produce Kool-Aid out of newspapers and all their other tricks was fascinating. Those were moments that gave my troubled mind a break.

On Thursdays, most domestic workers were usually given the day off or they knocked off early. So on Thursdays the bus stops were crowded with women wearing church uniforms – the red and white for Methodists, black and white for the Nederduitse Gereformeerde (NG) Kerk, blue ones for Catholics and long starched dresses for the African Zionist Apostolic churches. My three aunts were domestic workers, while Mother was and still is a housewife. The aunts brought sweets back from work. And for me at least one aunt also brought hand-me-down dresses because Paternal Grandmother – who was the mother-in-law of Mother – had said loud and clear that none of her son’s money was to be wasted on buying me new dresses. I didn’t mind. What did I know? I looked good in what I was dressed in any day. Even the dresses that were bought at the NG Kerk on bazaar days fitted me perfectly and I liked their bright colours. By that time my younger sister must have been three years old and she was the darling of the family. The family clan name was reserved for her only, uSgegede, but again I did not see anything wrong with that; she was a cute baby girl with chubby cheeks.

On one particular Thursday when all the kids ran to meet the Second Aunt as she was coming home from work, I followed them. She gave them sweets, which she also gave to the neighbours’ children. My younger sister who was standing in front of me got her share. When it was my turn, I looked down with my shy smile and brown eyes, holding out both hands in a receiving gesture. Instead of pouring sweets into my hands, Second Aunt shouted, ‘Nx! Go away, you boesman! I don’t have sweets for white things. Go and tell your drunkard boesman aunts to buy you sweets.’

Although I had been called that name many times before, it had never hurt as much as it did the day I was turned away from the sweets and told in front of the other kids that something was wrong with me. But I was a child and, like all children, I forgave and forgot the incident. But a similar one soon afterwards carried even greater hatred and anger.

* * *

Now here I must explain the structure of my so-called family. There were four houses in one yard; each family lived on its own but all were ruled with an iron fist by one feisty woman, the Paternal Grandmother. She was neither a tall nor short woman but was medium sized, pitch black, wrinkled, overweight and she wore glasses – not just for reading but ones with really thick lenses. I’d heard, and she later confirmed, that her husband died when the family still lived on a farm between Standerton and Bethal in what was then called the Eastern Transvaal. Paternal Grandmother had two boys. The older one was quiet and gentle and the younger was Father, Mother’s husband. He was quick-tempered and feared and evil in some ways, but he was a good provider for his family. Then there were five daughters. So, all in all, Paternal Grandmother was left to raise seven children all by herself.

‘Had it not been for his older sister, the man would still be single to this day,’ one aunt volunteered this information about Older Brother one Sunday afternoon in the back room where she used to sew dresses. ‘He enjoyed fixing cars, getting his hands dirty and all that, but he was never the type to be linked to girls, not even on the farm.’

After interventions from one of his sisters, Father’s Older Brother got hitched. He married Mother’s Cousin, bringing another Ndebele bride into the Nhlapo family, much to the disapproval of Paternal Grandmother who I heard would have preferred her older son to remain single for life. Apparently, Paternal Grandmother made her wishes known on the day of the wedding right in front of the bride’s family, announcing that her son shouldn’t be getting married at all. Family legend has it that the bride’s family was so upset by that statement that they asked their daughter to cancel the wedding, but she refused and became a wife in a family that had made it clear that she wasn’t wanted.

On the other hand, Father, the younger son, was a well-known and celebrated womaniser right from the days on the farm. Mother, when she’s in one of her good moods, will talk fondly of those days.

‘Your father used to have lots of girlfriends,’ Mother would say proudly. ‘He liked girls very much but he chose to marry me out of all those girls.’

As a result, Father married before Older Brother, which was a taboo in those days. As Mother fails to forget, she was honoured to be married to the younger son of Paternal Grandmother. Truth is, I still don’t know who and what the family ethnic group is, but that has stopped being my concern. Mother’s side of the family was Ndebele, albeit very light-skinned ones with blue and brown eyes, and they were mainly Afrikaans speakers, like most Ndebele families, I guess.

To the Nhlapo family, they had won the lottery with bonus numbers – scoring two girls who were both Ndebele and therefore respectful, hard-working and humble.

The story of Paternal Grandmother and her daughters, on the other hand, leaves a lot to be desired, especially in the old days when girls were reared just to get married and produce babies. Well, babies were produced at an alarming rate, but marriage? Not quite.

I knew that I should have studied Paternal Grandmother’s family a long time ago. Not only would the findings have helped to save my knees from kneeling and praying for a miracle that would never happen, but it might have helped me understand the behaviour of the stepfather – yes, the one still being referred to as my real Father to this day. Many say that if witchcraft runs in the family it’s almost impossible to break the spell. That’s the information I should have researched more thoroughly. But, better late than never, I know that now. Well, I’ve been kneeling and forgiving for way too long to abandon the search for the truth now. Didn’t the Good Book say the truth shall set us free? There really was no turning back. My only quest was to find the truth.

‘We’ve heard from many praying pastors’ – of course Mother omitted witchdoctors – ‘that you were born with a gift. You’re very lucky with money and you are highly intelligent. You’re the one who’s supposed to be uplifting this family financially, so the pastor told us. We know this. We’ve always known and we’ve seen it.’

I knew I had done something wrong by being a boesman. Since it was clear that there was something amiss with me, I resolved to stay out of trouble by playing on my own and not visiting other people’s houses, because I wasn’t sure who might be offended by me being a boesman. I also noticed that if I spent longer hours playing in the sun, my light complexion became a bit browner, so I made it my secret mission to try to transform my skin, just in case I succeeded and became a more acceptable darker colour.

* * *

A lot of changes took place in my seventh year. To this day I’m paranoid about the seventh year because I seem to expect something to change in my life, either good or bad. One day in that same seventh year one of my cousins called me. This cousin was named Saturday but the Zulu word for it. I was in my favourite spot next to the main gate and my cousins were playing with other kids next to the garage. I was puzzled when she said, ‘Ja, let’s fight,’ because I was not a fighter and she was older than me. Worse, I was the only skinny kid among all my meaty cousins. My big cousin, another good fighter, loaded sand in both her hands and closed them in her fists. This practice was to determine who was a coward: the first person to pound the fists was considered brave. The group began cheering, and I was hoping someone would come to my rescue, when the cousin punched my face.

‘Aye ye ye, boesman!’

‘Look, she’s turned blue!’

‘No, look, she’s turning red!’

It was obvious that the crowd was excited to see a fight between a normal person and a boesman. The punches rained down on my mouth, stomach and face. I was on the point of falling over but the cousin picked me up and shoved my head under her left arm where she punched my face mercilessly. I didn’t cry, but by the time she let go of me I fell to the ground and felt the earth rotate. The group was still cheering. I felt an urgent need to wipe my nose. My hand came away with blood on it.

‘Oh, look,’ shouted one girl in the group, ‘she’s got red blood! I thought boesmen had a different colour.’

‘It’s not red like ours. See, it’s weak. This thing has green veins, so what makes you think it can have the same blood as ours?’

I could not afford to mess my clothes. Mother would be hysterical. Moreover, how was I to explain what had happened? She was not going to believe it. Even with her eyes wide open Mother didn’t see a lot of the things that happened to me. Even if by chance she saw the blood, she was not going to believe me. But if she did, for a change, believe me she would report the matter to her husband, who would say I was lying. That’s what happened when I told her one of my cousins had pierced my bicycle tyre with a nail. Mother believed me, but the husband was furious. He was quicker to undo his belt than to check if the bicycle tyre was actually flat. Telling tales about incidents that happened in the yard was not an option because Mother could also get mad and use her morning slippers trying to beat the truth out of me. In fact, it took very little for her to become mad. Without seeking advice, I knew I had to get my clothes out of this mess and keep quiet about it.

I was down and defeated but the crowd did not disperse. Perhaps they wanted to observe how boesmen stood up after being beaten stukkend. Stand up I did, but I had to steady myself on the nearest wall before facing my cousin.

‘One day when I’m older I’m going to be strong and rich. You’ll come to me for help but I will turn you away.’

I heard sarcastic laughter and for a second it looked as though she was going to punch the lights out of me again.

‘You won’t be rich with my uncle’s money that you and your mother are wasting,’ she said. ‘And listen, boesman, I will never ask for anything from you because there will be nothing to ask for!’

To this day if I close my eyes I can still hear the loud laughter that followed from the crowd.

Since all my attempts to be accepted were unsuccessful, I gave up. It was useless to try to smile when I knew I was not wanted. And that was when I forgot what it was like to smile. A frown and a serious look became my mask. I felt safe behind that mask.

Quietly, I started reading every book I came across. Even though I was in a Tswana school, I taught myself how to read the South Sotho Bible, and when my cousins weren’t watching I stole quiet and peaceful moments to teach myself to read their Zulu books. I was hoping somewhere someone might mention the word boesman. I wanted so badly to know the meaning.

The torture continued. It hurt a lot but I reasoned it was perhaps a good thing done to get all the boesman blood out of me. I concluded that my blood was bad after all and maybe if it all bled out, even through pain, I’d be like my cousins and everyone would like me. With no one to talk to, I looked for answers in novels and the Bible. I could neither cry nor play. I had to keep my mind busy. And while I kept quiet I promised myself, deep down inside, that I was going to get even with them all, I was going to show them one day when I was older that boesmen weren’t stupid and bad as they were always telling me.

What I didn’t know during the time I was constantly being beaten up was that someone succeeded in tearing a blood vessel. This led to heavy nose bleeding that remained unexplained for years. As a teenager and into early adulthood, I frequently had nose bleeds. All I knew was that it made me weak and so I fainted from time to time. Because I had also been told I was born with a weak heart I assumed the fainting was a result of my heart problem.

When I was grown up and had started working, a general practitioner said I was anaemic, and that began a love-hate relationship with iron tablets. I was referred to an ear, nose and throat specialist (an ENT) who tried to patch my torn blood vessel but told me that this wasn’t a permanent solution to the problem. I had to be extra careful not to apply too much pressure on my nose, and not to expose myself to strong sunshine or else the blood vessel would open, my nose would start leaking again and I’d have to pay the ENT another visit.

Paternal Grandmother wasn’t unaware of the way in which I was treated. Moreover, she had her own way of ill-treating me. It was tradition that every weekend at one o’clock she would be served tea and brown bread and butter on the veranda. All the kids would join her. If I ate all the food given me, it would be ‘Mabovana is eating like a pig’, but if I did not want to participate it was ‘Mabovana is too full of herself because she thinks she’s better than us’. But one thing was certain: Mabovana or boesman, I passed both grades one and two with a first class. Some of my cousins were at the bottom of the list and even had to repeat some grades.

I had memorised many verses in the Bible and on the rare instances when Mother and I visited her parents who lived in a place I knew only as being ‘across the dam’, somewhere near the shining lights, Maternal Grandpa liked to tell me that Jesus loved me. He always prayed when we arrived and when we left. His church was not the NG Kerk like ours. He attended Assemblies of God, sometimes called the Back-to-God or Kwatata uBhengu.

I reasoned there must be different Gods because Mother and her in-laws belonged to a church and although Paternal Grandmother insulted me, and sometimes everyone else, she never missed evening prayers with the whole family, as well as saying morning prayers while she lay in her bed preparing to wake up to face the day. I figured that her God understood that she couldn’t kneel because she was fat. She either had to sit on a chair or lie down to pray. I hated her cruel God because without being told I knew it was the same God that Father prayed to.

I also intensely disliked Mother’s passive God who was so blind he didn’t let her see so many things that happened right under her nose. My hatred was something I shared only with the people I played with, the ones I drew on the ground, and some of the characters in the books I read but, come Sunday, we all went to church looking like a decent Christian family.

I liked the God of Maternal Grandpa because one could speak to Him anywhere and everywhere. Grandpa talked to Him standing up and I preferred conversations with Him with my eyes wide open – just in case someone was trying to hit me or do something worse behind my back. On those nights when the moon was full, I’d go outside and sit on a rock next to our house. I’d look at the shining lights across the dam and whisper to the God of Maternal Grandpa, ‘I’m going to be good. I’ll pass all my tests. I’ll wash the dishes and clean the house. I won’t eat a lot of food. If you can, please go and tell my grandpa they’re hurting me and I won’t forget you. I’ll always talk to you.’

To this day when I go on difficult assignments as a journalist and television producer, I still say this prayer I started reciting as a child. That’s the only way I know I’m safe. It was also comforting to know that in Maternal Grandpa’s home almost everyone was light-complexioned, some to the extent of being really white with blue eyes. If you have an uncle going by the nickname of Whitey, then you know your family is a bit on the extreme edge of the acceptable colour in a black township. Maternal Grandpa spoke mainly in Afrikaans. He didn’t seem to be embarrassed by it. He didn’t seem to know there was anything wrong with it. How I wished I could have stayed with him where I would be similar to everyone around me. But there was no way to ask for that. Children didn’t have rights then. We were seen but never heard. Social services and social workers were words I never knew existed until I was an adult living in the big city of Johannesburg.

More than twenty years later when I went to tell Maternal Grandpa that ‘those people’ had hurt me and called me a boesman, he said, ‘I know. I have always known. But I trusted God to protect you. I’m glad you have built enough courage to come to tell me this yourself.’

‘God’ (uZimu in his Ndebele language), Maternal Grandpa said, ‘never fails you.’

But my biggest gripe with God, even Maternal Grandpa’s one, was that He never stopped bad people from hurting me. I seriously thought that if He had wanted to He could just have done it without lifting a finger. I didn’t understand why He couldn’t just do that? It was not the physical scars I sustained during the ill-treatment that were too painful to bear – it was the hurtful words that almost killed me.

Surely God could do better than allowing me and others to suffer?

I’m still waiting to hear why He chooses not to intervene as quickly as possible.